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" Abhorring error is not necessarily positive. "
Ellen Ullman
Necessarily
Error
Positive
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" When I am around people I most admire, I tend to hug the wall. "
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" All things change, but we always have to think: what are we leaving behind? "
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" I won't use Twitter. Twitter posts are thought-farts. I don't care about unconsidered thoughts of the moment. "
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" I feel the best villains are the ones you have feelings for. "
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" Productivity has always been the justification for the prepackaging of programming knowledge. But it is worth asking about the sort of productivity gains that come from the simplifications of click-and-drag. "
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" I used to pass by a large computer system with the feeling that it represented the summed-up knowledge of human beings. It reassured me to think of all those programs as a kind of library in which our understanding of the world was recorded in intricate and exquisite detail. "
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" Before the advent of the Web, if you wanted to sustain a belief in far-fetched ideas, you had to go out into the desert, or live on a compound in the mountains, or move from one badly furnished room to another in a series of safe houses. "
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Ideas
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" Our Constitution is designed to change very slowly. It's a feature, not a bug. "
Ellen Ullman
Change
Our
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" Internet voting is surely coming. Though online ballots cannot be made secure, though the problems of voter authentication and privacy will remain unsolvable, I suspect we'll go ahead and do it anyway. "
Ellen Ullman
Internet
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" The questions I am often asked about my career tend to concentrate not on how one learns to code but how a woman does. "
Ellen Ullman
How
Questions
I Am
" The computer's there to serve the human being, not vice versa. "
Ellen Ullman
Human
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" I'm pretty bad at crying. "
Ellen Ullman
Crying
Pretty
Bad
" Even simple fixes can bring the whole system down. "
Ellen Ullman
Simple
System
Whole
" I came of technical age with UNIX, where I learned with power-greedy pleasure that you could kill a system right out from under yourself with a single command. "
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Right
Pleasure
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" Has Google appropriated the word 'search?' If so, I find it sad. Search is a deep human yearning, an ancient trope in the recorded history of human life. "
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Find
Deep
History
" The act of voting, to put it in computing terms, is a question of user interface. "
Ellen Ullman
Question
Act
Interface
" Multitasking, throughput, efficiency - these are excellent machine concepts, useful in the design of computer systems. But are they principles that nurture human thought and imagination? "
Ellen Ullman
Thought
Imagination
Design
" I don't consider myself a Jewish writer. "
Ellen Ullman
Jewish
Writer
Consider
" I don't like the idea that Facebook controls how people express themselves and changes it periodically according to whatever algorithms they use to figure out what they should do or the whim of some programmer or some CEO. That bothers me a great deal. "
Ellen Ullman
People
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Facebook
" Programming is the art of algorithm design and the craft of debugging errant code. "
Ellen Ullman
Code
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" I think technical people now should learn literature, because literature teaches you a great deal about how - the depths and variety of human imagination. "
Ellen Ullman
Imagination
You
Great
" I think many people have wonderful stories inside them and the talent to tell those stories. But the writing life, with its isolation and uncertain outcomes, keeps most from the task. "
Ellen Ullman
Writing
Life
People
" No one in the government is seriously penalized when Social Security numbers are stolen and misused; only the number-holders suffer. "
Ellen Ullman
Seriously
Numbers
Government
" With code, what it means is what it does. It doesn't express, not really. It's a very bounded conversation. And writing is not bounded. That's what's hard about it. "
Ellen Ullman
Hard
Conversation
Code
" I think that focusing all experiences through the lens of the Internet is an example of not being able to see history through the eyes of others, to be so enamored of one's present time that one cannot see that the world was once elsewise and was not about you. "
Ellen Ullman
History
Think
Time
" With all the attention given to the personal computer, it's hard to remember that other companion machine in the room - the printer. "
Ellen Ullman
Attention
Hard
Remember
" When I am writing, and occasionally achieve single focus and presence, I finally feel that is where I'm supposed to be. Everything else is kind of anxiety. "
Ellen Ullman
Feel
Anxiety
Focus
" Technology does not run backward. Once a technical capability is out there, it is out there for good. "
Ellen Ullman
Technology
Run
Technical
" It's possible to let technology absorb what we know and then re-express it in intricate mechanisms - parts and circuit boards and software objects - mechanisms we can use but do not understand in crucial ways. This not-knowing is fine while everything works as we expected. "
Ellen Ullman
Know
Understand
Technology
" I broke into the ranks of computing in the early 1980s, when women were just starting to poke their shoulder pads through crowds of men. There was no legal protection against 'hostile environments for women.' "
Ellen Ullman
Women
Protection
Men